I’d long dreamed of writing a series of children’s picture books where each flower essence becomes a child. Not texts but fairy tales. Not facts but fantasy. Stories where the magic of Nature would come alive in children’s minds and hearts to transport them into fanciful fiction with inspiring role models based on the qualities of these 20 flower essences.
I aspired to express their magic in a different way, a new way—to write books for children as well as adults – or, as our credit line says, “The Spirit-in-Nature Essences Storybook Collection for Little Blossoms of All Ages.”
Samantha Strawberry was the first book to be written. Bradley Banana, personifying humility rooted in calmness, was the first of the 20 books to be published, in the summer of 2010. Bradley is now also in Italian and Japanese.
Ten years ago, a July afternoon of errands in the quaint former gold-mining town of Nevada City—population 3,000-ish—left me sun-scorched and eager to escape the dry heat of the Sierra Nevada Foothills. I managed to survive by squeaking into the Del Oro Theatre showing of the latest Harry Potter film. Surrounded by chatty, screaming children with the scent of real-butter popcorn rising like smoke rings above the cushy chairs, I settled into my seat. Ah, great air conditioning. Too bad I forgot my down coat.
Onscreen the young Mr. Potter in one scene played the classroom teacher’s apprentice in the art of magic. He waved his wand and magic happened. He concentrated with great force and more impossible things came about.
That’s when it happened. That was the moment I decided it was time to write these books. If Harry Potter could perform magic, so could I – through these books.
A few weeks later, I joined a group of friends for a camping excursion to Lake Tahoe. The largest freshwater lake in North America, it once homed the Washoe Native Americans. Their tribal leader had said Tahoe was the center of their being: “I always heard from my elders that if you have problems, you need to go to the lake and wash your face, and let everything go.” The lake’s beauty, history, and chilling waters further inspired me.
In the magic of Nature at the Martis Creek Campground, I sketched out the character of Samantha Strawberry. Dignity was the quality uppermost in her nature.
I scribbled with a sharpened pencil on lined paper, remembering back to being hospitalized at a very young age with double pneumonia. Breathing had become an impossibility. Aside from being tortured by hypodermic needles, foul-tasting antibiotics, and pills too big to swallow, I missed my family terribly. I was a prisoner in my hospital bed. There was one way to survive – I would disappear into the fairy tale comic books my parents brought me each day. Through them, I could escape all torment and vividly live in the adventures of the characters who traipsed from one storyboard to another. The pomp, the drama, the simplicity: their lives became as real as my own.
The memory of that complete absorption remained with me. Could Bradley, Samantha, and their 18 siblings do the same for other young readers? It seems so, according to the children and their parents who read The Spirit-in-Nature Essences Storybook Collection.
Who is Bradley Banana? He had always been a quiet boy – a good listener, able to relate to the realities of others. He, like the essence that provides his surname, always remained calm, even at the grim prospect of walking a pirate’s plank. By his humble example, the proud Captain Clumpalong was to learn about humility. Talking about oneself all the time as a braggart, he found, does not bring happiness!
Here, in this hardcover book, is a message that children can easily absorb—not in the form of a lesson but through the example of their friend Bradley. Too much focus on oneself and too much self-protection are not the path to true humility. Those behaviors keep us forever walking the plank of egoic self-involvement. Self-forgetfulness, on the other hand, bestows upon us a liberating sense of calmness.
So that’s my story. And Bradley’s.
Listen to Lila Devi talk about Banana Essence in this online video